As we will be able to receive credits for completing achievements, what safeguards have you guys (Developers) thought of to prevent people from using achievement managers (I’ve used SAM to get me every TF2 achievement - no VAC ban possible) to unlock achievements and jumpstart their balance?

There’s a few games that aren’t possible to unlock achievements in, but I don’t know (or remember) why the reason was.

If you can’t figure anything out, the only thing I can think of is giving achievements a very small unit reward, even the difficult ones, but that might make players a little pissed and question the point of adding such a feature in the first place.

I’m hoping there’d be an alternative tracker to see if you ‘actually’ did the condition to get the achievement.
In this example; SAM and other achievement managers it’d just give you the achievement and nothing more since you didn’t actually do the conditions in the game to get the awards. The external checker basically looking for stats rather than the steam achievements stats (which a lot of games just do anyways).

As an example on how ‘not’ to tie items to achievements. Look no further than Payday 2, they tied it directly to achievements so you are given masks for simply getting the achievement with no external checking if you actually did the condition to get it.